Scarlet Hollow News

Gonna keep this one short!

We're going to be doing a marathon live stream of all four current Episodes of Scarlet Hollow with some special guests starting today, at 1pm EST on our Twitch channel: https://www.twitch.tv/black_tabby_games

It'll probably take us two days to get through everything, so if we need a second day, it'll be starting at 1pm EST tomorrow, again, on our Twitch channel.

While we've got you here, I also wanted to give a short roadmap on the content updates we have planned for Episode 4. They're less substantial than previous Episodes, but:

• We'll be making some changes to how Mystical functions in the Tea Room to bring it a little more in line with its performance later in the Episode. These changes will be informational, so don't expect different outcomes for that scene, just a little more fluff!
  
• Some time next week, we'll be releasing a whole new ending for the Episode 4 dilemma. We won't say anything beyond that, but it'll be neat!
  
• Alongside the above patch, we'll also be adding a few more achievements to the episode that were cut during our crunch. Y'all have been 100%'ing this too fast, but mostly we thought it'd be fun to add in some extras that highlight some truly rare worldstates.
  
• It looks like the Nightly build of Ren'py has the steam deck fix we've all been waiting for, so expect a patch for that shortly!
  

We've already started work on Episode 5, and we're extremely excited to see how it's been shaping up!

Cheers,
Tony + Abby

fixed a buggy transition into a cutscene where an empty dialogue box lingered on a black screen for a moment

Various bug fixes, as well as a handful of rebalances.

Highlights:

* Hot gets additional slight bonuses to relationships with other characters. (Already a hidden benefit of the Hot trait, but we amplified its effect slightly.)
* Doctor Kelly romance post Episode 4 no longer locked exclusively behind the hot trait.
* Late Episode 4 cutscene remastered. Final shot lingers less + music is sync'd better. (Whoops I loaded an earlier cut of the animation into imovie for the release build)
* Added some extra dialogue to a couple of post Episode 4 big decision branches.

Hey folks!

Big thanks to all of you for a truly special episode launch. The reception's completely blown beyond our expectations and we can't express how much it means to us to finally have been able to share this chapter with the world.

We just put out a patch that addresses most of the reported day 1 issues and makes some minor balance tweaks.

Most notable change is to the scene with Stella at the end of episode. If Tabitha is present and has a sufficiently close relationship to the player, she will insist that the player helps her talk to Stella, so it's easier for those two to reconnect without robbing the player of the emotional catharsis of the scene.

We also have a survey ready for you to share your choices with us, which, as always, we'll compile into a write-up and dev log! Here's the link to the survey: https://forms.gle/bgLfn4Hmk97pt3RSA

Thanks again!
Tony and Abby

Layering issues, a couple of missing sprites, and a couple of messed up variables around the major decision! For the latter, if you ran into an obvious issue at the tail end of the ep (error screen or dialogue that didn't make sense given your choices) you might want to replay from the big choice!